No more new ideas from Canadians

But there’s another observation that does come up surprisingly often: Canadians don’t stick to much. We are always coming up with new ideas, because we have forgotten our old ideas. It’s a surprisingly recurring theme, and it means that when a Canadian shows up somewhere with a brand-new plan to solve some vexing problem, a lot of other people around the table start to worry. They worry that in a few years the plan and the problem will still be around and the Canadian won’t, because the Canadian will have fallen in love all over again with some other problem.

Sorry to be the one to tell you this.

My morning paper features a splashy feature about the political attempt to find “fresh solutions” to the agony of Vancouver’s drug- and poverty-ridden Downtown East Side. Tucked away in the corner of one page is a little article about the Vancouver Accord, which bound the governments of Vancouver, British Columbia and Canada to an elaborate set of solutions for the neighbourhood. The problem with the Vancouver Accord is that it was signed in 2000, and after a few years the governments that signed it gave way to new governments looking for “fresh solutions,” and the solutions in the Vancouver Accord — stale because they required sustained effort over several years — “just fell by the wayside,” in the words of one of the accord’s signatories. What impressed too many politicians about “fresh solutions” was not that whether they were solutions, but that they were fresh.

In 2005 Robert Greenhill, a former president of Bombardier International, did a little research paper for the Foreign Affairs department in Ottawa in which he asked foreign-policy players from around the world — the editor of the Economist, Henry Kissinger — what they thought of Canada’s contribution to foreign policy. “What I have seen in Canada,” one of them told him, “is that you have a new priority every year. You are not serious.”

Greenhill’s nameless foreign observer was talking about foreign aid, but I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed in other areas. Tony Pawson, a British-born molecular biologist who works in Toronto, told me the same thing about Canada’s research effort. “It’s a peculiarly Canadian issue -- I can say as an immigrant,” Pawson told me a few years ago. “Canadians always worry about building world-class institutions. My view is that actually, Canadians are pretty good at building world-class institutions. What they’re not good at is sustaining them once they’ve got them -- because it takes a different order of commitment.”

And so we come, by a roundabout route it is true, to this year’s federal budget. Its goal was fiscal stimulus, which means spending, and it did that well. In terms of increases to discretionary programs this is the most free-spending budget Canada has seen in way more than a decade. This isn’t the place for me to hand out credit or blame for that; there was a weird little constitutional crisis in December, and Stephen Harper’s response was this budget, and the Liberal opposition voted for the budget, and that’s life. But what’s striking is that amid all the spending there’s still one place where the government found room to cut.

University research.

Let’s be clear here. The total post-secondary-education/science-and-research envelope did rather well in this budget, because not for the first time, the feds were eager to put lots of money into research infrastructure. So, the budget provides $750-million, through the Canada Foundation for Innovation, to build new university labs, and a further $2-billion to refurbish old university labs. There’s $250-million for maintenance for the federal government’s own labs. And there is $87.5-million for graduate scholarships, so graduate students can sit in all those labs.

But presumably the nation would hope, to the extent it has a preference on such matters, that the grad students and their lead investigators would be able to do something in the new labs. Research, maybe. And yet the budget cut the budgets of the granting councils that pay for continuing research in health, natural sciences and social science by close to $200-million.

That’s like buying a second car and cutting your budget for gas. It’s what you do when you like cars but you don’t actually want to go anywhere. It’s possible to understand why university presidents have not complained about this odd allocation of resources, and in fact few of them have: first, because any money is better than no money, and second, because they probably hope all this new research capacity will have to get used eventually.

But that’s been the hope for a while, and yet money for new infrastructure continues to outstrip money for the research that’s supposed to happen in it. Our whole university research system is turning into a demonstration of the Canadian inability to follow through. Perhaps it’s not too soon to begin fixing that.